He was up at 7:20. He called me up and he went to the bathroom. We came downstairs and finished reading Amulet #7. He got the scale out and weighed things as I made oarmeal. He asked me if a worker could park at the natural history museum for free. Actually, his question was broader, asking if workers that had to come to places with paid parking lots would have to pay. From there we also ended up discussing how credit cards work. And he told me 20 shekels was 2000 agorot “becuase a thousand is ten hundreds and a shekel is a hundred agorot.” He ate oatmeal and we played Polytopia. He started the Chemical Brothers. He danced to “Don’t Hold Back” again so I added it to his playlist. He read Ten Men to me and I read Let’s Go for a Drive! We then did the pirate store game again, first with me selling things, then with him being the shopkeeper.
I tried to get him to focus on planning time and we made an agenda for the day. We discussed Mother’s Day and he also wanted to go to Herzliya Park this afternoon. He made the beds, then he had iPad time. He played Dragonbox Big Numbers and watched some rocket launches.
For lunch we had crackers and meat and cheese and strawberries. We started a card for Carly, but didn’t get to writing on it. He had some more food, then we did a Brother and Sister tiger game. He remembered wanting to hook up the guitar, so we got the iPad and did that for while. We then started to decorate the card. On the back of it he drew a video game: “You roll a ball around, and that’s the entrance way, and you have to figure out how to get out of it.” On the front he wrote ‘August loves Mama’. Didn’t have any luck getting him to decorate the inside at all, or use markers, for that matter. This was all in pencil, as he loves my mechanical pencil.
He changed his mind about the park and decided to get his exercise in the yard. We went outside and played around. We looked at all the tomatoes. August wanted to tie up the tomatoes, but Carly is letting them sprawl out of the pots. I gave in and we used a stick to stand up one of the vines. He played on the slide for a long time, trying to climb up it and sliding back down. He kept repeating things like “Please, pick me up!” and “Somebody help me!” although he was just playing and didn’t actually want my help.
We went inside after 20 or 30 minutes. I made popcorn and we finished the first episode of Our Planet and got about 20 minutes into episode 2 before he ran out of popcorn. We got ready for swimming, and headed to school. We got there early enough to go to the library and exchange volume 7 of Amulet for volume 8. We had a few minutes until the bell rang, so we sat on a bench and started it. We kept reading for a few minutes after the bell rang, then went and delivered Carly her swimsuit. I spotted her walking down below and August went and excitedly met her on the steps.
We got to her classroom, which was dark and warm. She said it is how the high schoolers like it when Chris has his class in there. We had to wait a few minutes for Carly, and August said, “Why am I in this warm and stuffy room?” We all went and changed, and got in the pool. Probably the last sort of cool day until summer. It was rather breezy. We played in the pool; he’s moving around a lot now. Need to work on getting the floaties off. He started talking and acting like Carly, using what I called his mama voice: “It is the coldest thing ever.”
We got out, and were home by 4:30. As we had left the school he’d looked in the box that was mainly full of all of our discarded printer parts that hadn’t yet been picked up. But he also found a hard drive. It turned out to be an old 20gb drive from 2004. It was clearly broken. At home he got to work taking it apart. It was a really fun one to do and think about how it works. He then wanted to find that 5 shekel coin he had put in his basket last night. Only now he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the basket: “That’s why I hidded it so well even I couldn’t remember where it is.”
He played with the app for drawing mandalas on his iPad. I taught him what ‘opacity’ meant, so a word of the day. We had more of the noodles for dinner. August made sure I got him milk. After dinner he played some Khan Academy with Carly, then GarageBand. They read some Dogman, finishing one of them. Carly went up for a shower. We wrestled, then he had more mango pops on toothpicks, something he had done before we left for school. He spilled some of the toothpicks, so I put those in one of his little art supply drawers for playing with.
We went upstairs and he wanted to do more Brother and Sister game. I suggested Story Dice instead. I told a story about a missing brother and a talking sheep. Back downstairs he read The Old Truck and Bump! to Carly. He then got one of the ice cream sandwiches. He started saying lists of random rhyming words and wanted me to repeat what he said. I pretended a few times, then suggested turning it into a game where he starts with one, I repeat it, he adds a second, I repeat them, etc. and we see how long we can get. We did that a little.
We looked at the hard drive parts a little more, then sorted out all his coins by country and asked Carly where the big of pennies was so we could give him 6 pennies so he would now have a full dollar. As we were figuring that out he was adding up the coins he had and added 35 plus 25 in his head.
Carly took him up and washed his hair and had him brush his teeth. I came up and we read some of Amulet #8. He sang a tune based on “Animal Life”. I sang a few songs and he fell asleep at 9:50.
Guitar time:
Writing a card for mama:
Playing on the slide:
It’s like a megatub:
Opening the hard drive:
Word games:
Music before bed:
